Part Four
The Dark Way
YEARNING FOR NON-EXISTENCE
The five colors can blind,
The five tones deafen,
The five tastes cloy
The race, the hunt, can drive men mad
And their booty leaves them no peace.
Therefore a sensible man
Prefers the inner to the outer eye.
Lao Tsu
I've seen a figure bandied about that 80% of people are said to have a death wish, and a large part of them would prefer non-existence to existence. And there's a reason for this. If you crave non-existence, it's because your life is painful. And why is it painful? Well, let's get into that.
Your body places constant demands on your mind. Your body is a survival machine, and when you're awake during the day, it pumps out orders to your brain. Go get food, go get a mate, because procreation is a big thing in nature. Go find some shelter, go earn money, become powerful, become famous. The body's demand for continued survival is insatiable because of course, one day the body's going to die. You know this, so it creates a neurosis. And all these demands generate anxiety because the body only knows one thing in truth, it only knows pain. All desires are a pain. If they weren't a pain, we wouldn't strive to fulfill them. Of course, when we do satisfy an appetite, we get pleasure, which is the thing we're always after.
Our normal everyday state is that of anxiety, serving the needs of the body to get money, to gain recognition, to get food, to defecate, to have sex, endless demands. I could go on and on with that. If you really want to understand why people have a death wish, it's because in their mind is in a constant state of anxiety and pain, a steady state of wanting, of being unfulfilled and unsatisfied. And the body will generate those demands for as long as it lives. In fact, the demands may get stronger as there's an awareness of approaching death. And so you might see people, particularly older people, exercising every day, changing their diet, taking supplements, doing whatever they can to prolong the existence of the body - a state of profound anxiety. Just to emphasize this point, I've encountered some people who have bought into the self-help success stories. You should strive more, and in the striving, you can become successful, and you should be pumped up more and so on. Several of these people that I've met say the net result of all of that was they became much more anxious. Of course, they're going to become more anxious because all they're doing is pumping up desires and some part of us has to fulfill those desires. Our overburdened minds before all this getting pumped up with success stories were stressed enough. It needed to maintain the body, and maybe you need to support people around you - whatever is going on in your life. And now, all of a sudden, we've added a many more demands. You have to become a millionaire, you have to pump yourself up every morning. Generally, it doesn't happen. You can't make something happen that isn't going to happen. If you have no skill in business, there's no point in pumping yourself up. It's not going to add anything.
I think we can characterize life by several features. The first one is striving. Striving to continue in existence. Your mind can say whatever it wants. Your mind can say I'm fed up with all of this, and I prefer non-existence. But hey presto, you continue to exist because your body has the final say. Your body wants to continue living because only in extreme circumstances would a person end their life. Usually, people just complain, and the body keeps on. I want food, I want a sexual partner, I want shelter, I want a bigger car, I want fame, I want to be more powerful, and it goes on and on and on.
Let's list four or five characteristics of life.
The first one is striving. I think I've explained that. Your days are full of trying to get the resources that you need to continue with your existence. In our society, because people's imaginations are fired up with many ambitions, the striving becomes amplified beyond just simple needs.
The second thing is we're all restless. Very few people have a relaxed demeanor, and they're disturbed, they fidget, always on their phones or having to do something, they cannot sit still, their body is driving them all the time to try and do stuff.
The third thing we can say is that generally speaking, people act with haste. Haste is always a sign of ambition, a desperate need to try and achieve something - which is why so few people today produce anything particularly worthwhile, because they don't have the patience, they're always focused on the ambition. They may want to write a book, but they haven't got the patience to do that for a year or whatever. So haste. Striving restlessness, haste, noise.
Inner noise, constant chattering in their head. The chattering is nearly always about how someone is going to fulfill some desire. Maybe how they are going to impress someone, how they are going to turn their business into a multi-million dollar business and so on. The noise in your head is really just an internal conversation about your desires - how you're going to achieve this, how you're going to impress this person.
Finally, a kind of shocker I suppose, is that light is the driver of all of this. Now I'm talking about light slightly metaphorically, but light and energy are the drivers of activity and creation. So we have striving, restlessness, haste, noise, inner noise particularly, energy expenditure, light. Light is the source of our energy from the sun and is the source of all life on this planet, what some people might call the shit show. So light isn't necessarily a particularly good thing. I know that all the religions talk about light but there are some people, and Lao Tsu is one of them, who talks about the darkness, the stillness.
You can see the quote from Lao Tsu at the start of this section, and he says the five colors can blind. This is about life. The five colors can blind, the five tones deafen, the five tastes cloy, the race, the hunt can drive men mad, and their booty leave them no peace. Therefore, a sensible man prefers the inner to the outer. Very profound. The Tao Te Ching is just an endless source of wisdom. And Lao Tsu talks about our origin being a root. Where is a root? It's underneath the ground, it's silent, still. Whereas above ground is all the activity - sun shining on the leaves, the growth of leaves, things eating the leaves, diseases of the leaves and so on. All of that is happening above the ground, all the activity. But what happens? Well, eventually the top growth dies back in some species of plants, it dies back to the root, and it is the root that is nourished. But the root exists in this dark, still, quiet environment.
We've talked about life. Striving, restlessness, haste, noise, light, energy expenditure. What is the opposite of this, because the opposite would seem to be the right direction to go. While you have a body, you have to strive, but we can minimize striving, find the easiest way to get what we need, not what we want. What we want is endless, particularly in our consumer society. So minimize striving. The second thing is stillness, inner and outer relaxation. To let go. To be relaxed, to stop the noise in the head.
The third thing, instead of haste go slowly. Slowness is the opposite of haste. Doing things slowly will expose your ambitions. When you see yourself hurrying you can be dam sure there's some ambition behind that.
The third thing. Silence. Inner silence. It only comes with the diminishing of desires. You can't make silence happen. It's a result of a long period of work.
Finally darkness. I use the word darkness in a metaphorical sense. Although where I live it's sunny 300 days of the year and I get sick and tired of endless sunny days. I go out at night. We could equate darkness with the void or what used to be called the Pleroma - fullness, an ancient word meaning fullness. Fullness without manifestation. Self-fullness that doesn't require manifestation. Darkness is a potential, it's energy but energy that isn't in motion. Whereas light and power we experience during the day is a dissipation. We dissipate ourselves during the day, which is why we have to go to bed at night and rest. To summarize them - minimize striving, stillness, slow, silence and darkness.
Existence itself is like waves on the surface of the ocean. If you think of the void as the ocean - a huge mass that's dark and still within. I know
there are currents down there but for the sake of the analogy, it's dark and still and silent. On the surface there are waves, and wavelets on waves and they crash around and interfere with each other. The waves and wavelets are the things of ordinary life, perturbations of this otherwise still, deep, silent being. The force behind manifestation is the deep, dark, still, silent ocean bottom - this what people really crave.
I started talking about non-existence. What people are really after is peace, and the only way to get to peace is through a very long period of work. Work on one's own nature, because your own nature is your own worst enemy. Your survival drive, your body's survival drive will create hell for you as long as you live if you let it. You have to service it to some extent, you can't get around that. But if you want to go to the ocean bottom so to speak, then you have to let go of all the little wavelets and all of the disturbances on the top, and you have to dive down deep, very deep. On the way down to the ocean bottom is hell - your own desires and emotions. The stuff inside you that you'd rather not see because often it's unpleasant. But if you're going to look at your desires and understand them, and how the emotions are generated from them then you need to see it. Until you have that knowledge, you can meditate as long as you want, get pissed off at life as long as you want, nothing is going to change because you have no understanding that would allow things to change. Eventually, we come to a position where we can cultivate silence, stillness, darkness, lack of haste, effortlessness. The aim of all of this is very, very simple. The objective is to be and not to do.
THE TERROR
Many have talked about the terror of existence, or as Ernest Becker put it:
“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”
We are born, become someone, and then die and become nothing (we assume). Other creatures are spared the awareness of their future annihilation, but man carries it with him all his life. This fact is too brutal for us to bear (read Denial of Death by Becker), and so we sink into imagination. We invent an afterlife, create endless distractions, build “spiritual” traditions, and many other ways of deflecting attention from the fact we shall die. This is not a critical analysis. As someone once said to me, without the ability to sink into imagination we would become insane. However what is dangerous is the belief that our imagination is reality, and what is more, insisting that others should share our imaginary world.
Someone recently quoted a pretty, little, comforting thought that suffering is associated with finite beings, but peace comes through embracing the whole. Generally speaking things like this do not annoy me – it’s whatever gets you through the night. But this insistence that others should accept one’s own quieting notions does annoy. What does “embracing the whole” mean, other than something that is wholly imaginary for us. If people could simply say, “this is how I deal with the terror. I conjure up an imaginary entity called the whole and then imagine embracing it.” Instead we get statements that sound as if they are facts, or indicate knowledge that is only granted to the few.
The only way to deal with the terror is to go through it, and for that courage is needed and not happy ever after stories. The latter is a perfectly good strategy, but a person indulging in such stories will become increasingly neurotic as they battle with the doubts that are associated with the stories they tell themselves.
In realty only a few people will dare to venture into the terror. I have been involved with people who took me beyond my own “terror threshold”, and so there are people out there. But you are lucky if you meet more than a handful in a lifetime. Everything else is just distraction and neurosis – endless cycling between temporary relief and unbearable dread.
DANCING WITH THE VOID
There is an inherent blasphemy involved in writing about “the void” since it is inevitable that we try to give shape to that which has no shape. Essays of this nature are best treated as temporary scaffolds that might enable us to see a little further, and then are quickly dismantled.
It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, that a region of empty space will not stay empty for long, or a quiet mind will not stay quiet for long. In fact, there is no such thing as empty space, something called quantum froth fills even the tiniest volume of space with sub-atomic particles that pop into existence for the briefest of periods of time. Lao Tsu distinguished the void from existence by calling all the things that exist the ten thousand things. He saw the void as dark, silent and mysterious. The ten thousand things he saw as temporary manifestations to be thrown on the bonfire of vanities once they had been used up. He said that “Heaven is heartless treating all things as straw dogs. The sage is heartless treating all things as straw dogs.” Straw dogs are used in Chinese ceremonies and simply discarded or burned once the ceremony is over. It is the void that Lao Tsu values, being the womb from which all temporary manifestations appear – including you and I.
Like nature, people cannot help but make attempts to fill the vacuum. In our thinking, we construct elaborate concepts and theories to crush the unbearable silence of the void. We think in terms of meaning, purpose, values, order, good, bad – and so on. That concepts such as “purpose” and “meaning” are purely human affairs seems to be unnoticed by most people – the universe knows nothing about purpose and meaning. In reality, these concepts are simply attempts to validate ourselves, to avoid the eternal silence of what lies behind the ten thousand things. Spinoza referred to God as the “potential for existence”. Existence itself is hardly worthy of attention, it is the realm of the transitory – the ten thousand things. But the void is pure potential, and because it is not manifest it is eternal. And so all attempts to find meaning, purpose, the good, simply attempt to negate the void.
Dancing with the void is like dancing with a very desirable sexual partner. The desire to pull in a little bit closer is always going to be irresistible. Every part of us wants to fill the void – to explain everything, to acquire more stuff, to give life meaning, to have a purpose. But in the very act of doing these things we kill the real life and substitute it with some monster of our own making – a religion, spiritual practice, an ideology, notions of morality.
To dance with the void while resisting life’s invitation to destroy it is the ultimate dance – a constant tension caused by the manifest wishing to fill the unmanifest. And now this short piece is finished you can discard it, as just another attempt to fill in the void.
FORCES, LAWS AND THINGS
The world seems to be driven by forces of various kinds, gravity being one of the primary shapers of the structure of the universe. In fact it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that the stars, galaxies, black-holes and the like are merely coincidental. They come and go as gravity pulls masses together and then other forces blow them apart. That a particular star came into existence is neither here nor there, and in any case all phenomena are transitory – phantoms that appear because forces have conspired to produce some effect, and when the conspiracy is over the thing disappears.
Of course gravity is not the only force operating in the physical universe. Electrical and nuclear forces do their bit and the combination of all forces produces the universe as we know it. If we are looking for some kind of “truth” then forces are nearer to truth than things – at least if we use the conventional measure of truth as being something unchanging. Stars come and go, but gravity endures “forever”. And it isn’t as though these forces are completely unstructured, they obey well-defined mathematical laws. It is debatable whether the laws that apply to nuclear forces and the like are immutable, but even so they persist for much larger timescales than the things that manifest because of them.
Hopefully you get the gist that forces and laws are the real substance of existence, and things just come and go because of them. But it’s odd isn’t it that “real things” – people, atoms, trees, stars, are the least real because they are temporary and contingent. Greater reality is owned by forces and laws,
but they are invisible and known to us simply through thought.
If we want a firmer grip on the nature existence it would seem that we would do better to understand the forces and laws that shape it. So far I’ve only considered the laws of physics, but what about the law of sentient existence on this planet – might is right. If something is stronger and/or more devious than another thing it can have it for breakfast or exploit it in some other way. This is how life proceeds on this planet, and we get more of an understanding of the nature of life by looking at its laws than by considering individual creatures, since these are like all other things, temporary manifestations generated by the forces that are at play.
The slightly uncomfortable conclusion to draw here is that you and I are also temporary phenomena brought about by impersonal forces. It is the forces and laws that are eternal (for all practical purposes). The invisible (forces and laws) are the real, and the visible (things) nothing more than phantoms popping in and out of existence. It makes sense to look beyond phenomena if we want any sense of the nature of reality.
DEATH MEANS NOTHING TO US
The philosopher Epicurus came out with a wonderful one-liner that went like this:
“Death means nothing to us, because that which has been broken down into atoms has no sensation and that which has no sensation is no concern of ours.”
You have to remember that Epicurus lived before Christ, and his talk of atoms was two millennia before scientific discovery. In any case, his logic is pretty well infallible. While we are alive we should be concerned with living. Thoughts of death are futile since we can never know anything about death. This assumes that we have dismissed all ideas of some kind of life after death, for which there seems to be absolutely no evidence. I’m not dismissing near death experiences or other insights people may have had, but for most of us there is no evidence whatsoever of life after death. And so the problem we have to deal with is that of living the most pleasant life possible. Many great thinkers came to the conclusion that pleasure is simply the absence of pain, and Epicurus concurred with this. Here are a few quotes:
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 21